


Denial (Is Not Just...)

by thisiszircon



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (1963), Doctor Who: Virgin New Adventures - Various Authors
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-04
Updated: 2015-05-04
Packaged: 2018-03-29 00:39:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,611
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3875884
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thisiszircon/pseuds/thisiszircon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An underground laboratory, a nefarious villain, and a TARDIS crew that are having an off-day.  Just as well that the Seventh Doctor likes to keep an Ace up his sleeve...</p>
            </blockquote>





	Denial (Is Not Just...)

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks go, as always, to my invaluable beta, Nemo_the_Everbeing.
> 
> This story is set in the New Adventures universe, after Ace has left the TARDIS, and Roz and Chris have joined the Seventh Doctor and Benny.

"Forty-five seconds," said the nefarious villain.

Not that he needed to make this announcement.  He'd rigged up a handy visual aid - a digital clock with big, glowing numbers - which he'd mounted over the thick glass tanks which contained his genetically engineered fish-things.  The ones that were intended to cause the end of the world.

But he made the announcement anyway.  Just so there was no hint of ambiguity, perhaps.

Bernice Summerfield, fraudulent professor of archaeology and genuine space-and-time adventurer, peered through the low, eerie red lighting.  Her vision was still blurred from the hefty blow to the back of the head she'd taken.  She wished she felt less like any movement was going to make her violently sick.  This was a time to be proactive, not a time to be leaning heavily at the entrance to the underground laboratory, without the physical ability to even yell rude names at this ridiculous, moustache-twirling, has-to-state-the-crukkin'-obvious nefarious villain.

She checked out the rest of the team.  Roz was up against the far wall, trying not to look as groggy as she no doubt felt, having been the first casualty of the mission when she'd been tranqed and kidnapped hours earlier.  Her arms were spread wide and her wrists were shackled to the rock.  The villain held a revolver with the barrel pressed hard between Roz's eyes.  This, naturally enough, meant that Chris - the one member of the team who might yet be capable of doing something - was frozen into terrified inaction.

Then there was the Doctor, who lay gagged and bound by chains and manacles in the corner.  Crumpled.  Old.  Defeated.  His wide eyes caught Benny's and she thought she saw apology in them.

That was the moment she knew they were all going to die.

"Forty...thirty-nine..."  The bad guy had a gleeful tone to his voice.  He was in a perversely good mood, for someone who had just condemned himself to death along with all life on Earth.

Roz, with only the hint of a slur to her words, shouted, "Do something!"

Chris yelled, "Like what?"

"The tanks!  Break them!"

Chris glanced at the tanks: heavy-duty glass and steel, pipework and dials and all sorts of mad-scientist instrumentation sticking out at various junctures.

"With what?" he demanded.  "A withering look?"

This was a fair point.  Chris's blaster, along with Roz's, was sitting on a countertop on the far side of the laboratory.  He could go and pick his weapon up, of course, but not before the villain shot Roz in the head.

"Try!" Roz insisted.

"He'll kill you!"

"We're dead anyway!"

At which point, everybody looked at the gagged and bound Doctor.  The Doctor looked back.  'Looking' being pretty much the extent of his current faculties.

"Thirty-five seconds," the villain said, apparently amused by the exchange.

Chris was right: there was nothing anyone could do.  Roz was shackled to that wall, immobile.  Even if Chris managed some kind of assault on the bad guy that did not result in a bullet to Roz's brain, there was no longer time enough to free the Doctor and set him to work disabling this countdown to the apocalypse.  Benny was too far away and she was still recovering from a whack to the occipital.  Not that her skills were of the kung fu kind, anyway.

It was over.  They'd failed.  Shame, that a bad day at the office for them didn't result in a round of consolatory drinks at the nearest pub.  Shame the stakes always had to be so very high.  Benny said, "Bugger," and decided to make it her final word on the subject.  It seemed as good an epitaph as any.

Then she closed her eyes.  Perhaps it was cowardice.

The nefarious villain said, "Thirty seconds...twen-"

The world went bang.

Or, more accurately, **_BANG!_**

The roar deafened.  Dust filled the air, and small pieces of grit fell like jagged hailstones.  The whole cavern shook, reminding Benny that they were underground and that the day was likely to go much better for them if the ceiling didn't collapse.  Her eyes had flown open in shock, so she saw the way Roz refused to get distracted by something as humdrum as a very loud explosion.  Roz used the way her arms had been pinned to the wall to lift up her legs and curl them against her chest.  Even as the villain cast about himself in panic, Roz kicked out hard and forced him over.  He fell to the ground.  His gun went off, but the stray shot only managed to take out the digital clock with the big, glowing numbers; it exploded in a shower of sparks.  Chris took the opportunity to rush the fallen bad guy and kick the revolver clear, then to kick a few ribs too.  Chris didn't like people threatening his friends.

The roar lingered, long after the shaking stopped.  Maybe it was the halls and passageways of the underground complex extending the thunderous crack, making it reverberate.  Or maybe it was just down to the ringing in Benny's ears.  She shook her head experimentally to see if that made it go away.  It didn't, though it did remind her that shaking your head after suffering blunt force trauma is a bad idea.  She swallowed the need to projectile-vomit and finally got around to thinking, _'What the cruk is going on?'_

The dust began to settle.  There was a new hole in the rocky ceiling that let in light from the hillside above.  Sunshine streaked through in a bright, angled shaft, which only underlined how dim and gloomy everything had been up until then.  The dust in the air made the shaft of light look solid.  It was almost pretty.

And miraculously, like an arrow from the gods (or, more likely, a laser-beam), the sunlight fell directly upon the tanks.

In the corner Chris was helping the Doctor out of those manacles, having already retrieved the key.  (What the hell was it about nefarious villains and manacles?  It was like a fetish.)  Chris was probably thinking that they still needed the Doctor to do his last-minute thing at the consoles by the tanks.  He hadn't noticed the sunlight.

But the bad guy had.  He curled himself into a ball in the centre of the laboratory, shivering and hugging his knees.  Probably whimpering, if Benny could have heard anything over the ring of the explosion.  She examined him disdainfully.  A minute ago he'd been all 'bwahaha!'  Now he was like a toddler with his toys taken away.  It wasn't even as if he'd been injured.  Well, give or take a couple of Chris Cwej-sized boot-prints.

Because the hillside had exploded, but _no one had been injured_.  Which was, come to think of it, bloody impressive.  Or lucky.

Chris left the Doctor's side and went to unlock the shackles which pinned Roz against the wall.  Benny was still blinking dust from her eyes, but she saw the glare Chris was given for the way he'd freed the Doctor before attending to his partner.  Benny allowed herself a grin.  Roz, as soon as she was free, spent a moment stretching the kinks out of her shoulders, then she went over to the villain.  She was barely even staggering as she walked, so Benny could only assume that the tranq had all but worn off.  Roz grabbed some ties from her Adjudicator's kit and bound the man's hands behind his back.  He didn't even seem to notice.  Roz dragged him over to one side and propped him up against a wall.  Chris joined her there after retrieving their blasters.  He stood over the bad guy, weapon drawn.

And in the pressurised glass tanks, the horribly mutated _fukai_ \- the deep-water fish that had been thirty seconds away from a journey that would have seen them rupturing ecosystems, poisoning oceans and generally starting a planetary-wide apocalypse - had already begun to react to the sunlight that was so toxic to their form.  Pretty much _en masse_ , they expired.  Kind of quietly and pathetically.  The heaving, darting masses stopped heaving and darting and formed, instead, a layer of inert, bulbous, semi-translucent flesh.  The bodies sank, which seemed counter-intuitive because in Benny's experience dead fish floated, but of course, she'd never kept a genetically engineered goldfish in a pressurised tank.

Poor things.  They hadn't asked to become the living tools of a psychotic villain.  Benny felt a twinge of regret on their behalf.

As she studied the tanks, the mechanism holding shut the gate at one end lifted with a grind of gears and cables.  She'd forgotten about it being on a timer.  Not so long ago, that open gate would have spelled the end of the world.  Benny held her breath, because if even one of the _fukai_ had survived the light and managed to swim off into the waterways below that eventually led to the darkest depths of the Pacific Ocean, then the planet was still in serious, serious trouble...

No movement.  All the fish had died.  Still, Benny stumbled over to the tanks and activated the gate manually.  It slid closed again with another grinding clank.

The Doctor had stood up and was rubbing at his wrists.  He glanced at the tanks sadly, but it wasn't as if he hadn't already figured out that the _fukai_ needed to be destroyed.  He caught her eye and smiled.  Uncharacteristically, his emotions were overtly worn: relief, puzzlement, wariness.  He turned away and looked up at the sunlit hole in the lab.

Onwards and upwards, Benny decided.  Definitely upwards; she'd had enough of these underground shenanigans for a while, thanking you kindly.  She scrubbed some of the dust and gravel out of her hair, avoiding the sore spot at the back of her head.  So.  Now all they needed to do was work out what had caused the unexpected but oh-so-necessary explosion.

UNIT?  Unlikely, here in Japan.  Did Japan have its own version?  Possibly.  The Japanese were clever, organised people.

Benny looked up at the hole in the ceiling.  There was no doubt in her mind that whatever emerged from there in the next few minutes would want to point guns at them.  It might be better to leave the villain tied up in his own mad-scientist lab for the uniforms to find, and scarper back to the TARDIS before anything else went pear-shaped-

A rope slithered down the hole and fell almost to the floor.

Benny sighed.  Too late.  The Japanese commandos were already here.  She watched with a sense of glum expectancy, knowing it was useless to suggest to Roz and Chris that they holster their weapons, let alone disarm themselves.  This had played out too many times before.  Roz and Chris couldn't stop being cops, and when they refused to stop being cops in those areas where _other_ cops felt they had jurisdiction, it never ended well.

The rope jerked.  Benny glanced at the Doctor.  He caught her eye again and shrugged.  He was having the same thoughts as her.  They'd just have to play it by ear.

Ah well.  In the context of the day, they didn't have much to complain about.  None of their plans had succeeded, and the nefarious villain had been in control, and Benny had been convinced that they were all standing witness to the destruction of mankind.  If the miraculous explosion that had saved the world brought with it a few sticky moments as the Doctor tried to explain himself to the authorities, so be it.  Benny figured that two minutes ago they'd have grabbed at that particular result with both hands.

A dark figure emerged from the slanted hole leading up to the surface.  It came out backwards, a shadow in the light of the sun, and paused to do something with the rope, then it leapt out competently into the cavernous lab and slid down the rope to the floor, some kind of cloak or cape billowing dramatically around it.  Benny, dust and sunlight in her eyes, was a little nonplussed that further shapes weren't streaming down the rope after the first one.

The figure landed and stood straight.  Practised hands unclipped the rope as the figure looked around.  The dust settled a bit more, and the figure's ponytail and trenchcoat became clear.

"Bugger me," Benny said, though she still couldn't quite hear her own voice above the ringing in her ears.  "Ace."

Talk about dramatic entrances.  Annoyingly dramatic.  Was the billowing trenchcoat really necessary?  Benny wasn't sure that it was the most practical abseiling gear Ace could have chosen.

The Doctor, who had apparently been a bit ahead of Benny when it came to the issue of recognising an old friend, was already halfway across the lab to greet Ace.  Benny watched as Ace took in her surroundings.  Those cold and calculating eyes narrowed at the sight of the nefarious villain (who probably, come to think of it, had a name, although it was a bit late for Benny to learn it now), still all hunched up and hopeless with the failure of his world-shattering plan.  Then Ace's chin lifted with approval as she noted Chris with his blaster.  Typical.  Guns always got the thumbs-up.  Ace looked at the tanks and checked that there was nothing to be done there, though she'd have been a bit late if there was.  She noticed Benny standing beside the gate mechanism, and her professional expression slipped into a genuinely warm grin.  Benny felt a rush of affection and forgave Ace her billowing trenchcoat.  She grinned back and offered a little wave.

Then the Doctor said, "Ace."  Or maybe he just mouthed it; it was impossible to tell, because Benny was lip-reading.  Ace spun round to face him, which meant that Benny couldn't see the expression on Ace's face as she greeted the Time Lord.  But there were, of course, some things she didn't need to see.

There was a moment of pause.  Benny was peripherally aware of the way Roz had made her way over to join her by the tanks.

Then the Doctor and Ace reached for each other.  In the blink of an eye they were sharing the kind of embrace normally reserved for the closing scenes of a movie.  There were no words, no sobs, nothing overtly snivelly or smushy-face or anything like that.  Just clinging.  Tight, desperate, almost motionless clinging.

Bernice watched.  This was the third time she and the Doctor had met up with Ace since they'd parted company in nineteenth century Paris.  Every time, the same thing had happened.  Benny supposed she should be getting used to the ritual by now.

"Um," Roz said, speaking louder than usual, perhaps because her ears were ringing too.  "Who's that?"

Benny felt one corner of her mouth twitch in a half-smile.  (Just the one, though.  The other corner was resolutely flat.) "That," she said, "is Ace."

"Ace."

"Mm-hmm."

"As in - Ace?"

"Ace-Ace," Benny agreed solemnly.  "Former companion.  Explosives expert.  Ex-soldier.  Abuser of Daleks and botherer of Cybermen.  If-it-moves-blow-it-to-bits Ace.  _That_ Ace."

"Right."  Roz put her shoulders back.  "Better go and introduce myself."

Benny stopped her with a hand on her shoulder.  "Wouldn't bother.  Not yet."

Roz stepped back and looked at Benny curiously, but Benny only noticed out of the corner of her eye because her gaze was - just as it had been the last two times - pretty much fixed on the embrace shared by Ace and the Doctor.

"They'll be a while yet," Benny explained.

"Oh."

There was a pause.  If anything, the embrace taking place in the sunlit centre of the lab was getting closer.  It seemed less of a cuddle, more of an attempt at mutual suffocation.

Roz said, "So were they, um...?"

"Oh no."  Benny swallowed the lump in her throat.  "Although in four years, I've never seen the Doctor cry over anyone else."

"Cry, like, tears?"

"Yeah.  I mean, he cries.  We all cry.  About stuff.  Things.  Death and torture and hopelessness.  The Doctor isn't immune. But when it comes to the mundane stuff?  How we feel about the people in our lives..."

"He cried over Ace."

Benny lifted her chin against the bad memories.  "Few times."

"But they never-"

"Not to my knowledge."

Roz sniffed.  "Sounds like they should have done.  If someone's making you cry, might as well have the good stuff too."

Benny cracked another half-a-smile.  "Ohh, Ace goes out of her way to enjoy dalliances with men who are not even remotely similar to the Doctor."

"Oh yeah.  Denial?"

Benny shook her head wearily.  "Never worked that one out," she admitted.

"What about him?  In denial?"

"Oh, I don't thi-"  Benny made herself stop.  She'd prided herself, for a long time, on her ability to read people, yet that talent had never seemed to serve her during the Doctor-Benny-Ace years in the TARDIS.

For instance: up until quite recently she'd have confidently stated that the Doctor didn't have any capacity for romantic or sexual feelings, and she'd have based that assertion on the fact that she had never seen a glimmer of their presence.  But although Bernice Summerfield was a fake professor, she was a good scientist.  Therefore - and much to her own annoyance - she could not help but acknowledge that she was speculating.

(She'd never seen any evidence that the Doctor liked brussel sprouts, either.  Didn't mean she should therefore assume he hated them.)

"Nope," she said, as much to herself as to Roz.  "Never worked that one out either."

Benny decided she didn't like the conversation any more.  Nor did she like the way that the embrace she was watching showed no signs of relaxing.  How long had it lasted now?  Two minutes, maybe?  That was long, for a hello-hug.  Freakishly long.

She stood there with Roz, and watched.  Next time, she thought, she should remember popcorn.  The Doctor and Ace only moved when their clutch needed re-tightening.  Both faces were tucked into the shoulder and neck of the other.

Roz cleared her throat and said, "Do they, er, always do this, then?"

Benny's eyebrows lifted helplessly.  "Yup."

Roz glanced at her timepiece.  "Because that is one serious hug."

"Yup."

Another pause.  Roz blew air out of her mouth, as if it was something to do to pass the time.

"He doesn't mention her a lot," Roz said.  "You know.  For a woman he'll hold on to like this."

"It still hurts him," Benny explained.  "That she left."

"Far as I understand it, that's par for the course with him, though, isn't it?  He makes friends, travels with them a while, then they move on."

"That's the way it goes," Benny agreed.  "Only Ace was different."

"Why?"

Benny sighed.  "Okay - here's the thing.  You and Chris, and me, and goddess knows how many others down the years - we're pretty much all just random people the Doctor meets when he shows up somewhere and does his best to right wrongs.  Yeah?"

"I suppose so."

"So he meets us, and I'd like to think he likes us and, if the circumstances suit, we leave with him when it's time for him to go."

"Sounds about right.  But it wasn't like that with Ace?"

Benny rolled her eyes.  "Ace.  Oh, special, special Ace."  She didn't like the bitterness in her voice and swallowed it down.  "Ace wasn't random at all.  Ace was hand-picked."  She paused, for the sake of drama.  "By a god."

"A god."

"Near as makes no odds, anyway."  Benny shrugged.  "Never got the whole story.  Neither of them like talking about it.  But what I managed to put together?  This god character, Fenric - he had a nasty plan to do the Doctor down.  On account of being very miffed about how the Doctor had sorted him out once before."

"Kind of thing that could happen," Roz acknowledged.

"So this Fenric sets up a big ambush, involving a whole load of people whose lives he has manipulated.  Just to get them all to this one place and time.  Over generations, we're talking.  Centuries."

"So the 'god' description wasn't overstating things."

"Virtually omnipotent, far as I can tell.  Anyway, there's one person who's key to Fenric's plan.  Someone Fenric wants to set up as a sort of Trojan Horse.  Wolf in sheep's clothing."  Benny considered her words.  "Well, you know.  If sheep went around wearing Doc Martens."

"You mean Ace."

"Right.  So pre-ambush, Fenric sets up the Doctor with a new companion.  He needs someone  _in situ_ , in the TARDIS, establishing a relationship with the Doctor.  Fenric needs this person to become someone the Doctor really cares about, because it's no fun otherwise.  So Fenric has to pick just right.  And he picks Ace.  Grabs her, sixteen years old, out of her drab suburban existence in nineteen-eighties London.  Chucks her across time and space, just to meet up with the Doctor."

"So how did this Fenric choose Ace?"

"Far as I can tell, it's a mixture of stuff.  There was something about Ace's mother and grandmother being at the ambush, though my guess is Fenric sorted all that out after he'd picked Ace, just for badness.  Cruelty.  First and foremost, though, Fenric needed to pick someone that the Doctor...well, that he couldn't resist, basically."

Roz nodded.  "Fenric had to be sure the Doctor would want Ace to stay.  After they met."

"Yeah.  See, if the Doctor drops Ace back on twentieth century Earth straight after meeting her, Fenric's big ambush-plan turns to rat shit."

"So whoever Fenric chose - they had to tick all the Doctor's boxes."

Benny nodded.  "And there it is.  Apparently it is an undeniable fact that the things the Doctor craves most in his companions are a) an inability to deal with your emotions, b) a propensity for blowing shit up, c) a remarkable capacity for scoffing bacon sarnies and d) an insatiable libido."

There was another pause.  Benny felt her face grow hot.  Roz, beside her, shifted, perhaps in discomfort.

And in the centre of the underground lab, just below a bright shaft of sunshine that acted a bit like a theatre's spotlight and had probably rendered the rest of the cavern dark and indistinct, Ace and the Doctor relaxed their clutch just far enough to lean back and look at each other.  The Doctor's eyes blinked open, and their redness could have been a trick of the light but probably wasn't.  Benny couldn't see Ace's face, but she could see the way Ace's hands, clad still in the fingerless gloves she'd used to descend her rope, reached to touch the Time Lord's jawline.  In response, the Doctor's hands cradled Ace's face.

"Do they always do that too?" asked Roz.

"They did last time," Benny said.  Then she sniffed.  "Okay.  I'm being a bit of a cow about this.  Ace has plenty of good qualities as well.  She's loyal to a fault, to anyone she perceives as a friend.  Even me.  She learns fast, and has many, many skills.  There is nobody I would rather have with me if I'm in a bar and things kick off."  Benny gave a small smile.  "I used to think she didn't feel fear at all, but that's not true.  She feels it a lot, always has, so she's learned to control it.  Plus, she's a clever strategist.  And when all the shit is over and it's time to relax, she's good company.  Funny.  Likeable.  Even if she's never that _comfortable_ to be with."

"You seem to be pretty ambivalent about her," Roz pointed out.

"Oh, goddess, yes.  Ambivalent is the word."  Bernice gave a huge sigh.  "Ace is a friend.  I care about her.  Love her to bits, actually.  Met her on Heaven when she was barely in her twenties.  She was falling apart because of something particularly shitty the Doctor had done to her.  She was sweet then.  Genuine and warm and friendly.  She went off to the Dalek war after that, and I hooked up with the Doctor, and by the time she came back she was different.  All cold, hard edges.  No more ability to trust."

"War will do that."

"No question.  Doesn't make it easier to take.  Especially not for the Doctor, because he knows he was responsible."

"Ah."

"I sometimes forget about this, but it's important.  See, before Heaven, they'd already been together five years.  That's a long time, by his standards.  Put it down to the 'perfect companion' thing that Fenric engineered.  I was there, and I can tell you - he was beside himself when he lost her.  And when she came back, he was desperate to put things right.  But he couldn't quite manage it."  She grinned a bit.  "The two of them have that much in common.  They won't talk about anything.  Ever.  When there's trauma, they steer past it and then pretend it never happened.  If they can't do that, there's just weeks, months, sometimes years of passive aggression.  The two of them are incorrigible."

Benny and Roz studied the two people in the sunlight who were looking at each other with the same intensity a drowning man might look at a distant life-raft.

Roz said, "Well, they seem to be past the traumas now."

"Took them some time but they sorted themselves out.  Ace actually gave the Doctor a snifter of his own medicine.  Long story.  Involves me being totally fantastic in a punk band.  I'll tell you sometime."

"Sounds like the story will require alcohol."

"All stories require alcohol," Benny replied sagely.  "Anyway, that's the background with Ace.  Wasn't her fault she got caught up in some evil god's machinations.  But she did.  And ten years on, here we are.  She's got her own life, now, in Paris.  Uses this thing called a 'hopper' to jump around the timeline local to Earth.  That'll be how she turned up here.  Just as well, since she bloody saved the world.  Again."

The Doctor and Ace were murmuring to each other.  Benny wanted to know what was being said, and at the same time, felt like the best response would be to close her eyes and stick her fingers in her ears.

"She keeps popping up where the Doctor does, though," Roz prompted.

"I think she always will.  For all that they parted ways, she and the Doctor can't quite let each other go."

The murmured conversation ended.  Ace and the Doctor leaned in, and their foreheads touched.

"Apparently not," Roz observed.

One last pause, and then...then the embrace melted into something new.  And as Bernice watched, her sense of weary resignation at the reunion unfolding before her took a dramatic swerve into icy shock.

"Oh," she said.

"In fact, _definitely_ not," Roz added.

"No."  Benny's voice sounded small.  She coughed.  "Now that hasn't happened before."

Benny sensed Roz nodding thoughtfully beside her as the two of them watched all that was taking place in a streak of golden sunlight.  She tried to tell herself that she hadn't seen it coming, but she knew that wouldn't be one hundred per cent true.

"I'm sorry," Roz murmured, with some sympathy.

"Why?"  Benny hated the brittle tone in her voice.  "Nothing to do with me."  She narrowed her eyes.  "Not my fault he can't move on from the woman who'll only keep breaking him in two."

"Well.  Turns out denial is not j-"

"Just a river in Egypt, yeah, I know."  Benny needed distance.  She stalked around the room, making her footsteps loud, trying to disturb the Time Lord and his ex-companion as she headed towards Chris and the nefarious villain.

"Not just for the Doctor and Ace, I meant," Benny heard Roz mutter.

But Benny knew that.

**Author's Note:**

> Having recently undertaken a marathon re-read of my collection of the Virgin New Adventures, I became particularly cross when one of the authors (I honestly can't remember which one, as I type this) expressed the opinion that Bernice Summerfield was the first "real" companion the Seventh Doctor had, and therefore the first one of importance.
> 
> The author's reasoning was thus:
> 
> Mel was "inherited" from the Sixth Doctor.  
> Ace was forced on the Seventh Doctor by Fenric.  
> Benny was, therefore, the first genuine choice that the Seventh Doctor made regarding companions.
> 
> I suppose you could look at it like that. (It does, of course, require that you consider Sarah Jane to be somehow less important to the Fourth Doctor than the Third. For instance.)
> 
> I don't see it that way. I love Ace with a passion beyond words. The fact that she is the victim of Fenric's scheme does not mean she is unimportant. Indeed, my own opinion is that the Fenric story-arc imbues Ace with a unique importance and a rightness as the Seventh Doctor's companion.
> 
> Hence this story. I wanted to point out that Ace was not just a leftover from a supervillain's failed plot. She's actually a companion hand-picked by a virtual omnipotent, chosen to fit perfectly with the Seventh Doctor.
> 
> Well, that's what I reckon, anyway.


End file.
